The last straw would be the GOP supporting “gay marriage” (note: it’s NOT marriage). Christians would simple [sic] abandon the party and the GOP, which has seen decline in recent years would be destroyed.

Christians have been the first to “stay home” when the GOP ignores them on social issues. While there has been a small percentage who have been activists in the party for social issues, most Christians are inclined to “recline”… that is to say, stay home on the sofa. The party can’t afford to lose Christians. It’s why they have already lost the last two Presidential elections.

I'm politically displaced and an introvert. I'm not sure I want a whole bunch of new folks walking the political desert with me, but I am no position to cast the first stone when it comes to walking away from political parties. I walked away from both of them years ago.

There is, however, a larger question to ask. What the heck were Christians, politically conservative, liberal, or moderate, doing with the GOP in the first place?

Yesterday, Matthew Schmitz at First Things pointed out that Ayn Rand really, really hated C.S. Lewis, one of the great Christian apologists of the 20th Century:

Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.)

These insults and more can be found in her marginal notes on a copy of Lewis’ Abolition of Man, as printed in Ayn Rand’s Marginalia: Her critical comments on the writings of over 20 authors, edited by Robert Mayhew.

Schmitz's post reproduces many of Lewis's original notes with Rand's marginalia.

As I argued a while back in a long piece in Democracy on Rand and her contemporary influence, her boundless capacity for hatred was as often directed at religious conservatives as at “socialists.” And more than anything else, she most hated syncretism, the casual adoption by “second-handers” of bits and pieces of incompatible philosophical stances, particularly if it involved her own highly systematic thought

The question Huckabee and Howie now need to answer is why did politically conservative Christians ever side with the political party animated in large part by the philosopher who believes them to be mediocre abysmal bastards?

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